Lee Lorch

Lee Alexander Lorch (September 20, 1915 – February 28, 2014) was a mathematician, early civil rights activist, and communist. His leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side of Manhattan, helped eventually to make housing discrimination illegal nationwide but also resulted in Lorch losing his own job. He and his family then moved to the US South where he and his wife, Grace Lorch, became involved in the civil rights struggle there while also teaching at several Black colleges encouraging black students to pursue studies in mathematics and mentoring several of the first black men and women who were later to go on to earn PhDs in mathematics in the United States, before moving to Canada. He ended his career as Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at York University in Toronto, Canada.

He was born in New York City to Adolph Lorch and Florence Mayer Lorch. He graduated from Cornell University in 1935 and obtained his PhD in mathematics from the University of Cincinnati in 1941.

He did mathematically related work for the war effort in a "draft exempt" job but quit in 1943 to enlist in the United States Army. He saw service in India and the Pacific Theater of World War II before being demobilized in 1946. Lorch obtained a teaching position at the City College of New York following the war but was soon fired because of his civil rights work on behalf of African-Americans.

"I had become very aware of racism through the war; not just anti-Semitism, but the way the American army treated black soldiers. On the troop transport overseas, it was always the black company on board that had to clean the ship and do the dirty work, and I felt very uncomfortable with that," Lorch told an interviewer in 2007.

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